5 ms·

The unstoppable TI-84 Plus: An outdated calculator still holds a monopoly

41 points by gatsby 12y ago

Alupis 12y ago
I still have mine from high school statistics class. The best part was being able to side-load apps and play that spaceship game (phoenix something?) in class while looking like you were mad calculating some P Value.
- existencebox 12y ago
  So much nostalgia around that game. If you didn't get the ultimate weapon by the time the fast moving circles came around you're basically screwed, and would need to restart. (since money drop was RNG). I think that was actually the game that got me into programming, to figure out "how did they even do that." (and taught myself in isolation such terrible things as not understanding what a for loop was actually used for, and using it as a time delay loop.)
- 97s 12y ago
  I caused half of my friends in algebra to flunk thanks to pheonix. I had no idea they were going to play it that much when I transferred it to them. My teacher once said that if she found out who gave everyone pheonix on their calculators she was going to flunk them. Luckily no one turned me in. Man that game was great.
davidw 12y ago
Speaking of calculators, I have one of those HP stack-based (48 ?) things from 20+ years ago sitting around. Is there a market for those at all?
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Yes, a number of people collect them. But a quick scan of Ebay would show that.
- jdpage 12y ago
  I have the HP-50g. Love that thing, though I don't get to use it much these days. I bought it for taking the tests in my intro physics course at uni, after my TI-89 got stolen by some doucherocket. My physics professor was a huge fan of the HP RPN calculators, and recommended them highly. I was also notorious for bringing a slide rule into tests in case the batteries ran out on the calculator.
w1ntermute 12y ago
This is a repost (from 18 hours ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8260038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8260038
gohrt 12y ago
Oh the one hand, TI calcs were a wonderful tool and toy for the yound math needs -- i lusted for the 81 and 85. Maybe the 84+ is perfect for its job. On the other hand, it must have less than $15 wholesale unit cost now, and has no right to enforce a proprietary OS/software lockdown.
- Alupis 12y ago
  well, since you can sideload apps onto the tiny rom... and there are romdumps available online as well as the official ROM from TI's website... presumably one could make their own ROM or tweak it... but... I don't see much of a market for that as it's main purpose is to calculate...
ekianjo 12y ago
You'd be better with an Open Pandora running R to do any kind of Science work at school in a portable format. These calculators are completely ancient.
- JosephRedfern 12y ago
  Things like Battery Life, use during exams and the keyboard/button layout might be an issue, though. That and the fact that most high-school classes probably use TI calculators rather than R.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    I have a Pandora and I only need to charge it one a week or something, the battery lasts very long (even though I used it a couple of hours a day). So in the school context it would do just fine.
Ethan_Mick 12y ago
Relevant XCKD: http://xkcd.com/768/ http://xkcd.com/768/ If TI is such an incumbent, why haven't they been disrupted? Could someone come in and make a better calculator for a cheaper price (like Casio, in the article. Not sure if it's a better calculator though)? The other problem is, even if they did, no one would buy it because it wouldn't be available for the SAT/ACT. Edit: Casio in the article competes on price.
- smeyer 12y ago
  I don't think the problem is the SAT/ACT. That's a problem with cellphones, but lots of calculators are allowed on those tests, including the Casios[1]. The bigger challenge seems to be that teachers default to assigning TIs to their students. [1] http://sat.collegeboard.org/register/calculator-policy http://sat.collegeboard.org/register/calculator-policy Five different brands have at least 3 approved graphing calculators for the SATs.
  - cdwhite 12y ago
    This is it. In high school statistics, I tried to use my dad's HP-48g, which I dearly loved (in large part thanks to RPL---this was fairly soon after I discovered Scheme and dc). This didn't really work: the teacher would explain how to do something (automated statistical tests, for example) on a TI-89, and I'd have to spend a whole bunch of time trying to figure out the equivalent. This was a pain, and it was compounded by the fact that the HP-48 didn't have the same features as the TI-89, so I was frequently out of luck. The teacher wrote his homeworks and tests with an eye towards what was doable without too much effort on a TI-89, and I imagine that the TI people chose the featureset for the 89 with an eye towards what people would want to do in high school classes, so using anything else was an uphill battle. (We also had occasional homeworks in Excel, and I ran into the same trouble trying to do them in Perl. It didn't help that I was very far from an expert in either Perl or the HP-48g.)
    - gknoy 12y ago
      As a counterpoint, my HS classes used TI-81s, and I had bought a TI-85. Not all the things were in the same place, and so I often had to think of other ways of getting to the same place. At the time I thought it was a good thing, but I'm not sure if it was just that I was geeking out on the nicer hardware. ;)
blackaspen 12y ago
I still use my TI-83+ pretty often. All the years of using it with physics homework and statistics homework and whatnot has wired its usage into my brain. Sure, I could use R or Python, but when all I need to do is some simple math the calculator is always faster. It has tactile buttons I can operate with one hand, a clear readable screen, and a battery that lasts long. And it's simple. If mine broke I'd buy another one.
kitsune_ 12y ago
In high school I programmed a mini-RPG on a TI-85. It actually was quite a lot of fun (the programming, not so much the game). In our last year I think we could also buy either a TI-89 or TI-92 (which was quite the behemoth). In our school the math teachers were free to choose between TI and HP calculators, so we had some other classes / groups that had to calculate with reverse polish notation. At that time I laughed at this idea, thinking why would anyone choose this over infix notation. Then years later, after learning LISP and prefix notation, I laughed at my dumb younger self. Incredible that TI still reigns supreme.
macspoofing 12y ago
>"While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera ... " How about a bigger screen, more memory and a faster chip? I get that there still exists a calculator niche, but come on, it doesn't mean you just don't even try!
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I've got a TI 92+ which was, in my mind, the pinnacle of the calculator era. As I recall the 83 was Z80 based and the 92 was 68000 based, but what really made the 92 something I needed to keep was that it did pretty much everything Mathematica could do on a Sun-2 Workstation back in the day. As far as disrupting goes, I use TyDig on my iPad as my most often used "calculator" these days. The 92 doesn't come out much. But for the market (high school) it is hard to beat the combination of features and cost that a calculator brings to the table.
vlunkr 12y ago
"We have to keep evolving on this platform, but it can’t be innovation for the sake of innovation,” said Peter Balyta, president of Texas Instruments’ calculator division. “While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera, a whole bunch of things, we could do, but teachers don’t want us to. And it’s because we want to have a tool that kids can use in a classroom, on their way home, at home when they’re doing homework and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.” What a bunch of crap. They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. No one is asking for a camera or audio.
- toxican 12y ago
  Hell,if they kept the same price and added the sleekness, power, and recharge functionality I'd feel a little less taken advantage of.
- ahuth 12y ago
  If it works great for what people need it to do, why change it? I like things that do their core purpose very well, and this apparently does.
  - adamwong246 12y ago
    'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' - Henry Ford
  - gwern 12y ago
    > They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. It could cost easily a tenth of what it does. Compare the Shenzhen article on the front page yesterday which mentions full cellphones available for $9.
- burgers 12y ago
  > and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam. This is the most important part. Cheating is probably the primary reason these are used and not computers/smartphones etc. That is their niche. Test taking. With that, if you change the form factor etc, it becomes more difficult for test administers to recognize etc, and more power allows for programs that can be more "creative" and how they find answers to problems. The tool is a perfect reflection of being built for a very particular market.
mattfrommars 12y ago
I'm suprised how expensive Ti-89 Titanium was when I bought it compared to phones. Fucking TI.
beering 12y ago
I have fond memories of the TI-89 - all the power of a TI-92, but the same form factor as the TI-83/84, so it wouldn't raise much attention. Having a computer algebra system in my handheld calculator got me all the way from pre-algebra to intro diff eq in high school. It's hard to say whether it was unfair, but being able to try algebra and calculus things out on the CAS really helped me explore and understand concepts.
RIMR 12y ago
From the article: "Apple sells an iPod touch for $199 that comes with 16 gigabytes of memory" I tend to let it slide when people get memory and storage confused, but I hold journalists to a higher standard. This isn't even a semantic error; this came right after describing the RAM capacity of a TI-84 Plus C Silver. Nothing Matt McFarland wrote in this article was wrong, but it certainly wasn't highly-informed either... Comparing TI calculators to consumer electronics is a rather moot point. It's better to compare against the plummeting costs of microcomputers in general. The Raspberry Pi is better proof that TI is marking their products up 1000%+! Nobody needs a calculator with a 1GHz processor and 512GB of RAM, and 8-128GB of flash storage, so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost?
- zanny 12y ago
  > so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost? Because TI has tried in the past to introduce more powerful calculators, and that fell flat. The 84 exists because schools expect it. That is all. Until they accept your smartphone as a calculator, TI can markup the 84 as much as they want and everyone has to buy it because there is no free market in school calculators.
roywiggins 12y ago
There are worse monopolies, I guess. The 83+/84+ has good software and is neigh indestructible. The physical interface is very good and beats a touch screen. A TI calculator fast enough to run NumPy to build simulations and interactive gizmos would be super cool though. Allowing students to build colorful mathematical animations and physics simulations using simple building blocks would be awesome. Of course that can all be done with laptops but having things in the palm of your hand shouldn't be underestimated.
iamthepieman 12y ago
The TI-83 is more in the textbook market than the electronics or calculator market. Once you realize this, the price doesn't seem so surprising. At least, it doesn't seem any more surprising than textbook prices.
oneweirdtrick 12y ago
Here's a link for anyone who wants a TI simulation on their phones: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wabbitemu&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...
eloisant 12y ago
So in US teachers get to decide the calculator to use? That's crazy. When I was in junior high (in France) it was about 50/50 between TI and Casio. In high school a few kids had an HP48. The rare time there was something specific to do with the calculator (eg. calculating sequences) the teacher would ask one geek from each camp to explain to the class how to do it with calculators of that brand.
- nilsimsa 12y ago
  Mostly up to highschool and standardized exams. In college usually there was no constraints though many professors stated that we have to clear the memory before the exam. I used to have an HP48 for most of my college years.
- gknoy 12y ago
  You can likely use whichever you want during class, but at test time (APs, etc), there are only a few approved models.
- ewoodrich 12y ago
  For the most part, the primary concern is which calculators are used on exams, not during class.
- VLM 12y ago
  Yes, its seen as vocational training. Rather than teaching trig or how to apply it or what it means, you get how to display sine waves on a specific TI model. I'm old enough that my vocational training in high school math classes was on the venerable yet new at that time TI-81. That vocational training was not terribly useful in university classes, the rot had not reached that high (at that time)
batbomb 12y ago
One thing that was the "killer app" for graphing calculators, at least through college in the last decade (even with wifi), was the fact that there were apps. Graphing calculators were the first mass market mobile computers under $200 with what you could almost refer to as an app store, via ticalc.org (oh how many hours I spent on there). The interfaces had to be easy to use with low resolution screens and usually four directional buttons. Apps had to be about content. Games were pretty fun. My TI-89 has survived 11 years. It's survived bike falls, being thrown across the room several times (when I was too quick to grab it and it went flying out of the cover). I use it infrequently but the batteries haven't been changed in over a year. I still have more screen real estate when I am typing on it than I do with my iPhone 5 (both in vertical and landscape). It has actual buttons and I have muscle memory so I don't even have to look at it when I type in numbers and symbols. I have a periodic table app on my TI-89 that has been on there since 2003. The information someone in chemistry or physics needs is quicker to access than http://www.ptable.com http://www.ptable.com or wikipedia. I'm sure there are apps on an iPod that are probably better now, but an iPod's batteries don't last months. What could usurp it? Something in the same form factor that can last 48+ hours and take AA or AAA batteries. Something that provides temporary instructor override, allowing an instructor to enforce a policy temporarily (i.e. disable the CAS). Something that might integrate well with tools from TI that are out there. Something that's useful from middle school up to engineering/chemistry/physics. Maybe something e-ink (and/or e-ink buttons), plastic, ARM or Atmel, Linux, python and some sort of CAS (Mathematica/Maple branded) by default, with an App store/ecosystem. Something $50-$75. WiFi only, but off by default. Something that probably looks a bit like a nokia n800 or blackberry. I think that would be reasonable.
phireph0x 12y ago
I've owned 4 (!) different TI graphing calculators throughout the years. I believe it started with the TI-85 in the mid-90s, followed by the 86, then the 92, and finally culminating with the TI-89 in 1999. I don't think they've really surpassed the 89 in terms of functionality. I ended up selling the 92, as it was replaced with the functionally-equivalent 89 (in the familiar TI form-factor), and gave the 85 to my sister, so today all that remains is the 89 and the 86. I have fond memories of playing games and writing small programs on TI graphing calcs (ticalc.org still exists, apparently). At first only BASIC programs were supported, but then some folks figured out how to hack the 85 to run assembly, which continued on the other models. TI fought it at first, but later reluctantly supported assembly programs. Some enterprising hackers managed to implement rudimentary audio support via the data port, which I thought was quite impressive. The 84 Plus is essentially the old TI-82 platform iterated a number of times (TI-82, TI-83, 83 Plus, 83 Plus Silver, etc.) I've been waiting for years for TI to make a graphing calc smartphone app, but with margins such as those described in the article, why would they? It'll likely take a major shift in the testing standards (i.e. allowing mobile devices) for this situation to change. Test proctors might have to become more vigilant, but I imagine if airplane mode was strictly enforced, then smartphones might be allowed. Seems that the communications features (which can facilitate cheating) are the primary concern.

41 points by gatsby 12y ago

I still have mine from high school statistics class. The best part was being able to side-load apps and play that spaceship game (phoenix something?) in class while looking like you were mad calculating some P Value.

existencebox 12y ago
So much nostalgia around that game. If you didn't get the ultimate weapon by the time the fast moving circles came around you're basically screwed, and would need to restart. (since money drop was RNG). I think that was actually the game that got me into programming, to figure out "how did they even do that." (and taught myself in isolation such terrible things as not understanding what a for loop was actually used for, and using it as a time delay loop.)
97s 12y ago
I caused half of my friends in algebra to flunk thanks to pheonix. I had no idea they were going to play it that much when I transferred it to them. My teacher once said that if she found out who gave everyone pheonix on their calculators she was going to flunk them. Luckily no one turned me in. Man that game was great.

davidw 12y ago

Speaking of calculators, I have one of those HP stack-based (48 ?) things from 20+ years ago sitting around. Is there a market for those at all?

ChuckMcM 12y ago
Yes, a number of people collect them. But a quick scan of Ebay would show that.
jdpage 12y ago
I have the HP-50g. Love that thing, though I don't get to use it much these days. I bought it for taking the tests in my intro physics course at uni, after my TI-89 got stolen by some doucherocket. My physics professor was a huge fan of the HP RPN calculators, and recommended them highly. I was also notorious for bringing a slide rule into tests in case the batteries ran out on the calculator.

w1ntermute 12y ago

This is a repost (from 18 hours ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8260038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8260038

gohrt 12y ago

Oh the one hand, TI calcs were a wonderful tool and toy for the yound math needs -- i lusted for the 81 and 85. Maybe the 84+ is perfect for its job. On the other hand, it must have less than $15 wholesale unit cost now, and has no right to enforce a proprietary OS/software lockdown.

Alupis 12y ago
well, since you can sideload apps onto the tiny rom... and there are romdumps available online as well as the official ROM from TI's website... presumably one could make their own ROM or tweak it... but... I don't see much of a market for that as it's main purpose is to calculate...

ekianjo 12y ago

You'd be better with an Open Pandora running R to do any kind of Science work at school in a portable format. These calculators are completely ancient.

JosephRedfern 12y ago
Things like Battery Life, use during exams and the keyboard/button layout might be an issue, though. That and the fact that most high-school classes probably use TI calculators rather than R.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  I have a Pandora and I only need to charge it one a week or something, the battery lasts very long (even though I used it a couple of hours a day). So in the school context it would do just fine.

Ethan_Mick 12y ago

Relevant XCKD: http://xkcd.com/768/ http://xkcd.com/768/ If TI is such an incumbent, why haven't they been disrupted? Could someone come in and make a better calculator for a cheaper price (like Casio, in the article. Not sure if it's a better calculator though)? The other problem is, even if they did, no one would buy it because it wouldn't be available for the SAT/ACT. Edit: Casio in the article competes on price.

smeyer 12y ago
I don't think the problem is the SAT/ACT. That's a problem with cellphones, but lots of calculators are allowed on those tests, including the Casios[1]. The bigger challenge seems to be that teachers default to assigning TIs to their students. [1] http://sat.collegeboard.org/register/calculator-policy http://sat.collegeboard.org/register/calculator-policy Five different brands have at least 3 approved graphing calculators for the SATs.
- cdwhite 12y ago
  This is it. In high school statistics, I tried to use my dad's HP-48g, which I dearly loved (in large part thanks to RPL---this was fairly soon after I discovered Scheme and dc). This didn't really work: the teacher would explain how to do something (automated statistical tests, for example) on a TI-89, and I'd have to spend a whole bunch of time trying to figure out the equivalent. This was a pain, and it was compounded by the fact that the HP-48 didn't have the same features as the TI-89, so I was frequently out of luck. The teacher wrote his homeworks and tests with an eye towards what was doable without too much effort on a TI-89, and I imagine that the TI people chose the featureset for the 89 with an eye towards what people would want to do in high school classes, so using anything else was an uphill battle. (We also had occasional homeworks in Excel, and I ran into the same trouble trying to do them in Perl. It didn't help that I was very far from an expert in either Perl or the HP-48g.)
  - gknoy 12y ago
    As a counterpoint, my HS classes used TI-81s, and I had bought a TI-85. Not all the things were in the same place, and so I often had to think of other ways of getting to the same place. At the time I thought it was a good thing, but I'm not sure if it was just that I was geeking out on the nicer hardware. ;)

blackaspen 12y ago

I still use my TI-83+ pretty often. All the years of using it with physics homework and statistics homework and whatnot has wired its usage into my brain. Sure, I could use R or Python, but when all I need to do is some simple math the calculator is always faster. It has tactile buttons I can operate with one hand, a clear readable screen, and a battery that lasts long. And it's simple. If mine broke I'd buy another one.

kitsune_ 12y ago

In high school I programmed a mini-RPG on a TI-85. It actually was quite a lot of fun (the programming, not so much the game). In our last year I think we could also buy either a TI-89 or TI-92 (which was quite the behemoth). In our school the math teachers were free to choose between TI and HP calculators, so we had some other classes / groups that had to calculate with reverse polish notation. At that time I laughed at this idea, thinking why would anyone choose this over infix notation. Then years later, after learning LISP and prefix notation, I laughed at my dumb younger self. Incredible that TI still reigns supreme.

macspoofing 12y ago

>"While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera ... " How about a bigger screen, more memory and a faster chip? I get that there still exists a calculator niche, but come on, it doesn't mean you just don't even try!

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I've got a TI 92+ which was, in my mind, the pinnacle of the calculator era. As I recall the 83 was Z80 based and the 92 was 68000 based, but what really made the 92 something I needed to keep was that it did pretty much everything Mathematica could do on a Sun-2 Workstation back in the day. As far as disrupting goes, I use TyDig on my iPad as my most often used "calculator" these days. The 92 doesn't come out much. But for the market (high school) it is hard to beat the combination of features and cost that a calculator brings to the table.

vlunkr 12y ago

"We have to keep evolving on this platform, but it can’t be innovation for the sake of innovation,” said Peter Balyta, president of Texas Instruments’ calculator division. “While it’s tempting for us to build in WiFi, Bluetooth, audio, a camera, a whole bunch of things, we could do, but teachers don’t want us to. And it’s because we want to have a tool that kids can use in a classroom, on their way home, at home when they’re doing homework and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam.” What a bunch of crap. They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. No one is asking for a camera or audio.

toxican 12y ago
Hell,if they kept the same price and added the sleekness, power, and recharge functionality I'd feel a little less taken advantage of.
ahuth 12y ago
If it works great for what people need it to do, why change it? I like things that do their core purpose very well, and this apparently does.
- adamwong246 12y ago
  'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' - Henry Ford
- gwern 12y ago
  > They could make it more powerful, less bulky, add rechargeable batteries, or drop the price. It could cost easily a tenth of what it does. Compare the Shenzhen article on the front page yesterday which mentions full cellphones available for $9.
burgers 12y ago
> and also a tool they can bring in during their most important exam. This is the most important part. Cheating is probably the primary reason these are used and not computers/smartphones etc. That is their niche. Test taking. With that, if you change the form factor etc, it becomes more difficult for test administers to recognize etc, and more power allows for programs that can be more "creative" and how they find answers to problems. The tool is a perfect reflection of being built for a very particular market.

mattfrommars 12y ago

I'm suprised how expensive Ti-89 Titanium was when I bought it compared to phones. Fucking TI.

beering 12y ago

I have fond memories of the TI-89 - all the power of a TI-92, but the same form factor as the TI-83/84, so it wouldn't raise much attention. Having a computer algebra system in my handheld calculator got me all the way from pre-algebra to intro diff eq in high school. It's hard to say whether it was unfair, but being able to try algebra and calculus things out on the CAS really helped me explore and understand concepts.

RIMR 12y ago

From the article: "Apple sells an iPod touch for $199 that comes with 16 gigabytes of memory" I tend to let it slide when people get memory and storage confused, but I hold journalists to a higher standard. This isn't even a semantic error; this came right after describing the RAM capacity of a TI-84 Plus C Silver. Nothing Matt McFarland wrote in this article was wrong, but it certainly wasn't highly-informed either... Comparing TI calculators to consumer electronics is a rather moot point. It's better to compare against the plummeting costs of microcomputers in general. The Raspberry Pi is better proof that TI is marking their products up 1000%+! Nobody needs a calculator with a 1GHz processor and 512GB of RAM, and 8-128GB of flash storage, so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost?

zanny 12y ago
> so why are we paying for even more than what that would cost? Because TI has tried in the past to introduce more powerful calculators, and that fell flat. The 84 exists because schools expect it. That is all. Until they accept your smartphone as a calculator, TI can markup the 84 as much as they want and everyone has to buy it because there is no free market in school calculators.

roywiggins 12y ago

There are worse monopolies, I guess. The 83+/84+ has good software and is neigh indestructible. The physical interface is very good and beats a touch screen. A TI calculator fast enough to run NumPy to build simulations and interactive gizmos would be super cool though. Allowing students to build colorful mathematical animations and physics simulations using simple building blocks would be awesome. Of course that can all be done with laptops but having things in the palm of your hand shouldn't be underestimated.

iamthepieman 12y ago

The TI-83 is more in the textbook market than the electronics or calculator market. Once you realize this, the price doesn't seem so surprising. At least, it doesn't seem any more surprising than textbook prices.

oneweirdtrick 12y ago

Here's a link for anyone who wants a TI simulation on their phones: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wabbitemu&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Revsoft.Wa...

eloisant 12y ago

So in US teachers get to decide the calculator to use? That's crazy. When I was in junior high (in France) it was about 50/50 between TI and Casio. In high school a few kids had an HP48. The rare time there was something specific to do with the calculator (eg. calculating sequences) the teacher would ask one geek from each camp to explain to the class how to do it with calculators of that brand.

nilsimsa 12y ago
Mostly up to highschool and standardized exams. In college usually there was no constraints though many professors stated that we have to clear the memory before the exam. I used to have an HP48 for most of my college years.
gknoy 12y ago
You can likely use whichever you want during class, but at test time (APs, etc), there are only a few approved models.
ewoodrich 12y ago
For the most part, the primary concern is which calculators are used on exams, not during class.
VLM 12y ago
Yes, its seen as vocational training. Rather than teaching trig or how to apply it or what it means, you get how to display sine waves on a specific TI model. I'm old enough that my vocational training in high school math classes was on the venerable yet new at that time TI-81. That vocational training was not terribly useful in university classes, the rot had not reached that high (at that time)

batbomb 12y ago

One thing that was the "killer app" for graphing calculators, at least through college in the last decade (even with wifi), was the fact that there were apps. Graphing calculators were the first mass market mobile computers under $200 with what you could almost refer to as an app store, via ticalc.org (oh how many hours I spent on there). The interfaces had to be easy to use with low resolution screens and usually four directional buttons. Apps had to be about content. Games were pretty fun. My TI-89 has survived 11 years. It's survived bike falls, being thrown across the room several times (when I was too quick to grab it and it went flying out of the cover). I use it infrequently but the batteries haven't been changed in over a year. I still have more screen real estate when I am typing on it than I do with my iPhone 5 (both in vertical and landscape). It has actual buttons and I have muscle memory so I don't even have to look at it when I type in numbers and symbols. I have a periodic table app on my TI-89 that has been on there since 2003. The information someone in chemistry or physics needs is quicker to access than http://www.ptable.com http://www.ptable.com or wikipedia. I'm sure there are apps on an iPod that are probably better now, but an iPod's batteries don't last months. What could usurp it? Something in the same form factor that can last 48+ hours and take AA or AAA batteries. Something that provides temporary instructor override, allowing an instructor to enforce a policy temporarily (i.e. disable the CAS). Something that might integrate well with tools from TI that are out there. Something that's useful from middle school up to engineering/chemistry/physics. Maybe something e-ink (and/or e-ink buttons), plastic, ARM or Atmel, Linux, python and some sort of CAS (Mathematica/Maple branded) by default, with an App store/ecosystem. Something $50-$75. WiFi only, but off by default. Something that probably looks a bit like a nokia n800 or blackberry. I think that would be reasonable.

phireph0x 12y ago

I've owned 4 (!) different TI graphing calculators throughout the years. I believe it started with the TI-85 in the mid-90s, followed by the 86, then the 92, and finally culminating with the TI-89 in 1999. I don't think they've really surpassed the 89 in terms of functionality. I ended up selling the 92, as it was replaced with the functionally-equivalent 89 (in the familiar TI form-factor), and gave the 85 to my sister, so today all that remains is the 89 and the 86. I have fond memories of playing games and writing small programs on TI graphing calcs (ticalc.org still exists, apparently). At first only BASIC programs were supported, but then some folks figured out how to hack the 85 to run assembly, which continued on the other models. TI fought it at first, but later reluctantly supported assembly programs. Some enterprising hackers managed to implement rudimentary audio support via the data port, which I thought was quite impressive. The 84 Plus is essentially the old TI-82 platform iterated a number of times (TI-82, TI-83, 83 Plus, 83 Plus Silver, etc.) I've been waiting for years for TI to make a graphing calc smartphone app, but with margins such as those described in the article, why would they? It'll likely take a major shift in the testing standards (i.e. allowing mobile devices) for this situation to change. Test proctors might have to become more vigilant, but I imagine if airplane mode was strictly enforced, then smartphones might be allowed. Seems that the communications features (which can facilitate cheating) are the primary concern.